Breakpoint

The New York Times recently told the story of Maha Kassef, an elementary school teacher in Montreal who, like many teachers, dreams of one day being a principal. That dream may never happen, and for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with her qualifications.

Quebec’s new government recently proposed a law that would bar public employees, such as teachers and police officers, from wearing religious symbols while at work.

Thus, a Muslim like Kassef could not wear a hijab or headscarf. A Jew would be forbidden to wear a yarmulke; a Sikh a turban; and a Christian a cross.

While Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedom says that freedom of “conscience and religion” is “fundamental,” the Quebec government has invoked the “notwithstanding clause,” which allows federal and provincial governments to temporarily override some provisions of the Charter.

Under the proposal, current employees like Kassef would be “grandfathered” and could continue to wear their headscarves, turbans, or crosses. But if they ever changed jobs or sought a promotion, the new provisions would then apply to them as well.

François Legault, the premier of Quebec, continues to insist that, despite the proposal, Quebeckers remain free to practice their religion. He also maintains that the proposal represents the values and desires of the people of the province.

That sort of reasoning should sound familiar to those of us south of the Canadian border. Most infringements on religious freedom here in the U.S. also come with an insistence that people are still free to practice their religion, just not in the workplace. And just like the Quebec proposal, infringements here are often justified by an appeal to some “values.”

In Quebec, the values come from an almost-fanatical secularism.

Legault’s party controls the legislature, so he has the votes to enact the proposed bill. The question is whether the widespread condemnation of the proposal outside the province and opposition to it within, will cause Legault to table it.

The United States Constitution, as Rod Dreher correctly pointed out, makes a similar proposal here a nonstarter. But still there are some important lessons we have to learn from this story.

The most important lesson is that religious freedom is indivisible. As we see in Quebec, a law that bans the wearing of a hijab in the workplace also bans yarmulkes, turbans, and crosses. To the aggressive secularists behind such proposed laws, any religion other than their own, which they deny to be a religion, is a private matter that has no place in the public square.

This lesson was recently driven home to us in Texas. Patrick Murphy, a man scheduled to be executed, asked that his Buddhist spiritual advisor be able to accompany him in his execution. But the state said “no.” If he were Christian, yes. Muslim? Of course. But not a Buddhist. The case went to the Supreme Court, which ruled that only allowing Christian and Muslim clergy in the death chamber violated Murphy’s free exercise rights.

So what did Texas do? Rather than find Murphy a Buddhist spiritual advisor, it just banned all clergy from the execution chamber. That removed any possibility of Buddhists being singled out for discrimination.

I doubt that Justice Kavanaugh and the other members of the majority had this so-called “solution” in mind. Even so, it offers us a powerful reminder that religious freedom is for everyone. Texas, like Quebec, decided that, rather than accommodate the religious freedom of some death row inmates, it would deny the religious freedom of every death row inmate.

Religious freedom has its limits, as it should; but it must be for all, or we’ll soon discover it’s for no one.

As a reminder, there’s still time to sign up for tomorrow’s webinar on the topic of “Holy Sexuality.” Just come to BreakPoint.org and click on this commentary. We’ll link you to the sign up.

How do you craft a major justice reform bill that will appeal to both progressives and conservatives—as well as to faith-based and secular organizations? According to Prison Fellowship Vice-President of Government Affairs Heather Rice-Minus, you appeal to their core principles.

Today on the BreakPoint Podcast, Heather Rice-Minus explains to the Colson Center’s Warren Smith how the First Step Act—a milestone criminal justice reform bill—garnered such overwhelming bipartisan support.

She also discusses why she, a criminal justice reform advocate by profession, is also involved in the pro-life movement. Again, the answer is core principles.

http://www.breakpoint.org/2019/04/podcast-a-big-first-step-for-justice-reform-with-heather-rice-minus/

Thirteen months ago, the University of Virginia men’s basketball team suffered the most humiliating defeat in NCAA Tournament history. Not only were the Cavaliers the first number-one seeded team is history to lose their opening round game to a sixteenth-seeded team, the University of Maryland Baltimore County beat them by twenty points. This season, they were forced to endure the same chant at every road game they played: “UMBC! UMBC!”

Well, on Monday night, Virginia beat Texas Tech in the NCAA championship game, in overtime. Since then, the word “redemption” has been frequently used to describe this year’s much better season ending. It’s a word that fits for reasons that go well beyond basketball.

But there’s another word that fits, too. After Monday’s big championship win, UVA coach Tony Bennett said the word that best described his team was “faithfulness.”

For context, especially for anyone out there not completely absorbed by March Madness like I am, prior to Virginia’s 2018 loss, sixteenth-seeded teams were 0-135 against top-seeded teams.

Given that it had never happened before, no one knew how UVA would respond this year. They responded well. This season, Virginia’s win-loss record was 29-2.

Of course, everyone already knew the Cavaliers were a formidable regular-season team, especially with their suffocating “Pack line” defense. The question was whether, as ESPN’s 538 website put it, UVA was a “postseason fraud.”

In fact in their opening game this year, they were once again a #1 seed facing a #16 seed, this time Gardner Webb. And, they fell behind by fourteen points in the first half. Bennett told the Washington Post, “I remember thinking, ‘We can’t go through this again.” So he told his players that he “could accept losing, but couldn’t accept anything less than every single thing they had to give.”

Message received. They rallied to win. It was the first in a series of nail-biters—what sports writer John Feinstein called “miracles”—that eventually culminated in Monday night’s championship victory.

“When the clock ran out and the confetti fell,” Feinstein wrote, “Bennett, a deeply religious man, sat on a stool in Virginia’s bench area, head bowed, giving thanks.”

Bennett’s giving thanks after making history is in keeping with his biblically-based approach to coaching. Yes, you heard me correctly, “biblically-based.” Four years ago, the Washington Post ran a story on Bennett, and the title was “Bennett builds Virginia basketball on pillars of faith.”

The story described how Bennett visited a recruit’s home, emphasizing defense and team play. As he was leaving, he told the player, “Live by faith, not by sight.” The player, who went on to play for Bennett for four years, said, “That’s what sold me. After that, I was like, ‘I want to play for this guy.’”

The same Washington Post story explains why Bennett used the word “faithfulness” on Monday night to explain his team’s win: “There’s a reference in the Bible,” Bennett said in the article, “that if you’re faithful to the little things, then there’ll be more, and you’ll be faithful with more.”

When times were hard, Bennett would ask whether he and his team were “being faithful to the things that matter to our program?” If they were, that’s what mattered. The devout, Bible-quoting coach would encourage his team “don’t grow weary of doing good.” That of course is easier said than done. It requires faith that doing good is its own reward. In other words, it requires faithfulness.

We now know the results of Bennett’s strange use of Christian words and concepts to coach basketball. Tony Kornheiser of ESPN called UVA’s journey from humiliation to national championship a “Shakespearean” act of redemption. I think it would be more accurate to call it “Biblical.”

C. S. Lewis’s “The Screwtape Letters” has a lot of amazing insights on the working of our enemy, but one of my favorites occurs when the demon undersecretary advises his nephew: “Above all, do not attempt to use science…as a defence against Christianity. [It] will positively encourage [your patient] to think about realities he can’t touch and see. There have been sad cases among the modern physicists.”

Of course, what Uncle Screwtape calls “sad cases” are wins for Christianity! One such case is Dartmouth theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser, who was recently profiled by Scientific American. Gleiser is known for studying the properties of the early universe, the behavior of fundamental particles, and the origin of life—in other words, he’s studying those realities we can’t touch or see that Screwtape mentioned.

To be clear, Gleiser calls himself an agnostic, not a Christian. Still, he’s the latest recipient of the Templeton Prize—awarded to individuals who have made “an exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension.” The reason is simple: Gleiser, unlike many science popularizers in our day, boldly admits that science has its limits and urges his fellow scientists to respect those limits.

There’s a metaphor he uses to illustrate this, which he calls the Island of Knowledge. It’s also the title of a book he’s written. He urges us all to imagine all the discoveries of science as a small island, surrounded by an ocean of the unknown. “The paradox of knowledge,” he observes, “is that as it expands and the boundary between the known and the unknown changes, you inevitably start to ask questions that you couldn’t even ask before.”

In other words, science is so limited that not only are there many things we don’t know, we don’t even know how much we don’t know! Thus, the very best scientists are humble—recognizing the limits of their discipline and understanding that science cannot offer answers about ultimate meaning, purpose, or moral truth.

This is quite a contrast to many science popularizers, who frequently wander off the Island of Knowledge into water way over their heads. Gleiser mentions both Lawrence Krauss and the late Stephen Hawking, both known for making bold claims that science not only tells us how the universe exists, but why. Another well-known example is Carl Sagan, who famously began his “Cosmos” TV series with this pronouncement: “The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be.” All of these men were or are outspoken in their atheism, confidently declaring that science disproves the existence of God, or at least renders Him unnecessary.

Categorical statements of non-belief like this, says Gleiser, don’t just go beyond the bounds of science. They’re actually incompatible with the scientific method.

“This whole notion of finality and final ideas,” he told Scientific American, is “just an attempt to turn science into a religious system.” There’s a name for that religious system: scientism—the belief that science is the only valid source of human knowledge. Instead of staying humble and curious, proponents of scientism insist that any question we can’t answer in a laboratory isn’t worth asking. In effect, they stand on the little island of knowledge and deny the ocean lapping at their toes.

This reminds me of a debate between apologist William Lane Craig and Oxford chemist Peter Atkins. Atkins called science “omnipotent”—that’s a Divine attribute! According to him, there’s nothing science cannot explain. Craig smiled, disagreed and then listed five things science can’t explain: logical and mathematical truths, metaphysical truths like the existence of other minds and the external world, ethical values, aesthetic judgments, and most importantly, the scientific method itself!

Gleiser may not be convinced yet of God’s existence, but I do pray for the increase of this theoretical physicist’s tribe. We need more scientists who give faith a fair shake, and fewer advocates of scientism who think they already know all the answers.

How can Christians make their Gospel witness more plausible in this increasingly atheistic and disenchanted culture? Today on the BreakPoint Podcast, John Stonestreet talks with Paul Gould, professor of philosophy at Oklahoma Baptist University, and author of the outstanding book, “Cultural Apologetics: Renewing the Christian Voice, Conscience, and Imagination in a Disenchanted World.”

Resources

Cultural Apologetics

Paul Gould, Zondervan, 2018

Pensees

Blaise Pascal, Dover Publications, 2018

Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel in Western Culture

Leslie Newbigin, 1988

City of God

Augustine of Hippo,  Penguin Classic, 2004

There’s a line credited to C.S. Lewis that I often repeat: “The most dangerous ideas in a society are not the ones being argued but rather the ones that are assumed.” In our time, that saying perfectly describes the idea that our desires determine our identities.

Our culture has fully trained people, when they talk of sexual desires, to not say “I feel,” but rather to reach for being verbs like “I am.” “If I experience same-sex attraction,” they’ll say, “therefore I am gay.”

Author and Moody Bible Institute professor Christopher Yuan thinks it’s time to expose this unspoken idea, and how it’s poisoning not just our culture, but individual lives.

He knows. For years, Yuan self-identified as a gay man and lived an incredibly broken life. He was kicked out of dental school on the eve of graduation for selling drugs to faculty and threw away his relationship with his Christian converted parents in favor of gay bars and the life of a dealer.

At one point, Yuan says his father even handed him a Bible, and he chucked it in the trash can. Not long after, he found himself in prison, where he received the life-altering news that he was HIV positive. Yuan recounts catching sight of another trash can while incarcerated and thinking to himself, “This is my life.” But then he noticed something on top of that trash can: a Gideon’s Bible. He picked it up and began to read it, at first out of boredom, but later with growing interest.

After wrestling with Scripture and trying to reconcile it with his choices and sexual identity, Yuan came to a crossroads: either to let his attractions determine how he lived, or to find his identity in Jesus. By the grace of God, Yuan chose Jesus.

Today, having taken the unlikely course from prisoner to Bible professor, Yuan emphasizes the need to rethink along the lines of what Scripture teaches. For example, something most Christians know by experience: Conversion doesn’t end temptation. The battle with what the Apostle Paul calls “the flesh,” remains, including when it comes to our sexual desires. That’s why Yuan has chosen to think with different categories. As he says, the goal of the Christian life isn’t to become heterosexual, it’s to become holy—whether we pursue that through lifelong celibacy or in marriage.

Holiness is the subject of Yuan’s latest book, which is the Colson Center’s book offer for the month of April. In the book, “Holy Sexuality and the Gospel: Sex, Desire, and Relationships Shaped by God’s Grand Story,” Yuan subjects the issues surrounding sexuality to the bigger questions—those questions that shape our worldviews, which in turn shape our lives. Questions like, “What is sexuality for?” “Why do we have desires?” and “What’s the purpose of marriage?”

Yuan offers answers that are not only grounded in Scripture, but that also debunk the lies of our culture—lies like, “abstaining from sex is impossible,” or “unconditional love means unconditional approval,” or the biggest lie of all, “I am the sum of my desires.”

“My identity,” writes Yuan, “is not gay, is not ex-gay, is not even heterosexual…my identity as a child of the living God must be in Jesus Christ, alone.”

Out of his clear thinking about sexuality and personhood, Yuan offers advice for those who have a loved one who confesses a struggle with same-sex attraction. He tells readers first to acknowledge that trust, and to let that son, daughter, sibling, or friend know up front that they’re not alone—that you will walk with them, love them, and pray with them no matter what.

Yuan boldly affirms what the Bible affirms about homosexual behavior. It’s a sin, he writes, one whose destructive power he knows all too well. But he refuses to shackle people to the embedded ideas contained in words like “gay,” “straight,” “bi,” “trans,” or any of the other labels our culture uses to reduce people down to their desires.

To get a copy of “Holy Sexuality and the Gospel,” come to BreakPoint.org and we’ll tell you how. We’ll also link you to other resources to help you love, walk with, and pray for those who are struggling with same-sex attraction.

On this week’s program, John Stonestreet and Warren Cole Smith look at the impact of “Unplanned,” a new pro-life film that exceeded expectations in its opening weekend, despite a surprise “R” rating. Our hosts also discuss Georgia’s heartbeat bill that would outlaw abortion after a heartbeat is detectable, and highlight a California adoption agency making a difference for children with severe disabilities. Finally, they cover the recent decision by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, AKA the Mormon Church, to make major concessions to LGBT relationships.

A recent article in the national magazine of the Sierra Club asked the question, “Does a Bear Think in the Woods?” Beyond the clever play on the old rhetorical question, the article made the remarkable claim that the intelligence of bears, chimpanzees, and other great apes shares “many properties with our own.”

What prompted the article was a study of black bears in the northeast. A researcher, who has spent twenty-two years observing these animals in New Hampshire, told the author that bears are “like us. They judge. They punish. They have gratitude and friendship.”

The article also cited the example of a black bear in Upstate New York who figured out how to open the “latest in bear-proof cannisters.” Soon afterwards, “other local bears soon followed suit,” which prompted the question; “Did she teach them?”

Of course, no one who has owned a dog would find any of this all that surprising. That animals have what might be called feelings is undeniable, and animals are often smarter than we expect them to be. One of my friends successfully trained his Portuguese water dog to open a refrigerator and bring him a beverage. And many nature documentaries teach us that most animals spend the first part of their lives learning by emulating their mothers.

All of this can be amazing to watch, but it still leaves us a long way from saying that animals think like humans in any meaningful way. It certainly doesn’t warrant calling the woods a “neighborhood” instead of a “habitat.”

One of the things that’s behind the tendency to anthropomorphize bears, dogs, and other animals is the belief that animals and people are locked in a kind of “zero sum” game, as if the only way to assure the continued survival of animals is to deny and/or diminish how distinctly different they are from humans. In the process, man’s unique role as God’s image bearer and steward in the created order is also denied.

These denials are especially obvious in all the talk about animal “culture.” In humans, “culture” includes the “customs, arts, social institutions, and achievements of a particular nation, people, or other social group.”

No animal, no matter how smart or clever, has produced anything that remotely resembles these things. Whenever the word “culture” is used to describe animal behavior, it is always defined down to mean “socially transmitted behaviors,” such as a group of chimpanzees using a stick to dig up termites or Japanese macaques washing sweet potatoes before eating them.

Calling this “culture” only makes sense if human uniqueness has been ruled out beforehand.

It’s not only animal achievements that are puffed up in an effort to put us homo sapiens in our place. The past few decades have seen a strange new respect for Neanderthals among anthropologists.

For a century after the first discovery of Neanderthal fossils in 1856, they were regarded as brutish “ape-men.” While that assessment was wrong, what has been substituted for it is just as wrong. Just as is done with animals, many anthropologists conclude that homo sapiens must decrease and Neanderthals must increase.

And, just as is done with animals, this increase involves inflating the Neanderthals’ “cultural achievements.” Even though the evidence for things, such as art, that would indicate a capacity for complex and symbolic thought, is virtually non-existent, what does exist can reasonably be attributed to copying the behavior of homo sapiens.

And so, scratches in caves are proclaimed as art and the presence of bird bones are cited as evidence of Neanderthal fashion in a sort-of forced attempt to see evidence of “creativity” in the smallest and most improbable things.

All of this wishful thinking rejects the unique status humans have in the created order as created in God’s image and as co-creators with Him. It’s a status that no bear shares, no matter how many bear-proof containers she can break into.

Anyone who’s ever been verbally bullied can tell you that the old saying “sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me” is nonsense. Words are powerful things. They can harm people. In fact, words can create whole categories that confuse men and women into a twisted understanding of their bodies and souls, and can even wreck their lives.

To be clear, I’m not talking about just insults. I’m talking about labels—the words we use to think about ourselves and the power they have to shape our lives, especially our sexual identities.

Just ask Jamie Shupe, who recently told his story in the Heritage Foundation’s Daily Signal. Shupe was America’s first legally-recognized “non-binary” person. In fact, his case opened up the non-binary status for people in eleven states and counting. His journey didn’t begin with reworking gender labels. Before he won the right to be known as non-binary, he claimed to be a transgender woman, writing about his experience in The New York Times and receiving rock-star treatment from the LGBT movement.

There was just one problem: Shupe wasn’t, in fact, a woman trapped in a man’s body or a genderless being. He was a victim of childhood sexual abuse and a veteran with PTSD. Now, after changing his mind and going back to living as a man, he admits that assuming new gender identities and fighting for their legal recognition was his way of trying to make a fresh start. The scary part is how, at every step, the medical community, state governments, and the news media legitimized his confusion.

As Shupe writes: “When a licensed medical doctor writes you a letter essentially stating that you were born in the wrong body and a government agency or court of law validates that delusion, you become damaged and confused…The truth is that my sex change to non-binary was a medical and scientific fraud.”

I hope you’ll read Jamie Shupe’s sad but revealing story. It’s heartbreaking. And the saddest part of his story is that it exposes the new gender identities embraced by so many as artificial, harmful, and dehumanizing.

Of course, there have always been those who have experienced gender confusion, and who have dealt with their sexual attraction in ways that are at odds with our God-given purpose. What’s new today is the set of scripts that’s currently imposing these confusions on individuals: If you’re a little girl who plays with trucks, one script goes, you must really, deep down, be a boy. If you’re a young man who has trouble relating to others of your sex, you must really, on the inside, be a woman. And if you have a mix of both traits or just can’t decide, well then, there’s a new script for you, too. You’re “non-binary.”

In all of these cases, it is the words—the categories that our culture has made up and imposed on real people—that carry all the power. In the long run, the mismatch between these categories and the people on whom they’re imposed becomes painfully obvious.

Last year on BreakPoint, we highlighted a study that called transgender identification a “social contagion” among teenagers—in other words, it’s something many adopt because it’s what all the cool kids are doing. We also know that between 63 and 94 percent of minors who identify as transgender will later change their minds, or “desist” as it’s medically termed.

This research, and stories like Shupe’s, show how easily the new gender labels can consume a person’s identity while burying real trauma that needs treatment. Young people especially need to know that turning words such as “transgender” and “non-binary,” and even “gay” and “lesbian” into categories of identity is a practice younger than I am. Seriously, this just started yesterday. But now, they’re so often assigned as identity labels to anyone who fits an arbitrary set of stereotypes. As a result, they dominate lives and cause immeasurable damage.

That’s why refusing to accept these labels isn’t an act of hate, as we are told, but rather it’s an act of love. As Christians called to this confused cultural moment, we should be sensitive to people’s experiences, recognizing that trauma often plays a major role in gender confusion. At the same time we should be clear that trendy labels and identities aren’t the answer, and the best way to honor others’ humanity is to refuse to perpetrate this medical and scientific fraud against others.

The movie “Unplanned,” a Pureflix biopic about former Planned Parenthood director-of-the-year Abby Johnson, had more than a few “unplanned” obstacles to overcome for its opening weekend.

First, the Motion Picture Association of America gave the film an R-rating because of its depiction of abortion. As I mentioned on The Point last month, how tragically ironic that in many states a teenage girl doesn’t need parental permission to get an abortion but needs it to see a movie about abortion.

Then, by some weird “coincidence” (yes, I’m using scare quotes there), the movie’s Twitter account was suspended on the day of the movie’s release. And of course, CNN, the Hallmark Channel, and almost every other major network refused to accept advertising dollars for the movie. Even a major Christian music network refused to promote the film.

Even so, “Unplanned” brought in $6.1 million over the weekend, and Forbes magazine predicts it will gross $16 million, which would be “a solid win” for a limitedly-distributed film.

I took my daughter to see “Unplanned,” and I was moved. Even more, I left convinced that it teaches an incredibly important lesson: Silence about abortion is unacceptable and the reasons Christians give to justify their silence—like abortion being too “political” or too “negative”—are tragically bogus.

Abby Johnson was the youngest Planned Parenthood director in the country. Over her eight years with the organization, she grew increasingly uncomfortable. As she says at her website, she realized “abortion was a product Planned Parenthood was selling, not an unfortunate necessity they were fighting to decrease.” Then, she was asked to assist with an abortion, and watched the abortionist kill a 13-week old baby.

That was the final straw, and the rest, as they say is history. A history now on film for all to see.

Of course, it’s no surprise that Planned Parenthood and its allies don’t want you to see behind the curtain of this national evil. As long as abortion remains hidden, they can continue to peddle their talking points, half-truths and lies: that abortion is not really the taking of a human life; that abortion is a compassionate choice for women; that Planned Parenthood isn’t in this for the money; and that this is about helping women, and on and on.

What is surprising and what “Unplanned” exposes in a powerful way, is how misguided, and even cowardly, it is for Christians to remain silent. We have our reasons, of course: “It’s not Christian to protest abortion clinics,” we are told. Abortion is a “political issue,” and we don’t want to make those who have had an abortion feel bad.

“Unplanned” unmasks just how misguided each of those talking points is. First, it contrasts harmful protesting with the incredible power of prayer and consistent presence. When Abby escaped Planned Parenthood, she ran directly to the Human Coalition, people she met day after day after day outside of her clinic.

Second, the film earned its R rating because it showed the realities of both surgical and medical abortions. See it for yourself if you still think this is about “politics,” and not about the ending of innocent human life.

And finally, in a particularly poignant scene in the movie, Abby begins to realize the enormity of the evil she’s participated in—20,000 abortions, 20,000 lost lives. Her only recourse is forgiveness.

Churches that are silent about abortion—because it ruins the positive vibe they want to have, or whatever—aren’t dealing in reality. To ignore this issue because we don’t want people to feel badly is to literally leave them in their guilt and shame. Why would any Christian who’s been forgiven want to do that? Why wouldn’t we want to point others to the love and forgiveness of Jesus that we’ve found, so they can find the redemption and the help that they really need?

I’m thankful to see Abby Johnson’s “Unplanned” story finally make it to the big screen. I’m thankful that it’s exceeded so many expectations. And I pray that we will seize the opportunities we have, like the one this movie presents to us, to speak up loudly about abortion.

And today, on the BreakPoint Podcast, Warren Smith interviews Abby Johnson. You can hear her story directly in her own words—at BreakPoint.org or wherever you download podcasts.